LOL, it is kinda manageable - the first thing I do is change the search results area from the default of "hits" which puts out a spaghetti mess of results. You can change it to "name" which sorts the results based on the name of the newspaper area. For instance Albany newspapers generally are listed first and Yonkers newspapers last. If you have any idea of the area you are looking at - this helps immensely to tame the beast. Of course even doing that you have to remember that some of newspapers start with
"newspaper - Utica (or whatever area) so always look at the newspaper entries also.

then just play with it- trying different search methods, boolean versus exact and then there are the fuzzy searching options (I just generally keep it fuzzy searching checked, but with fuzziness set to the minimum of 1 - this generally takes care of times when an a is misread as an o type of thing. For some reason after the turn of the century (1900's ) men were often referred to by their initials, so if you are looking for Charles Weston Smythe also search for C. W. Smythe. For many years women were known only by their husbands name. so if searching for a female's obit, search for her husband. Even if she was a widow odds are that she will be listed as Mrs. (husband's name).
to get used to it, practice with a search on someone you already know a lot about. see if you can "find" the information by searching. There is also a tutorial on his site. I don't know a lot about that however. good luck